Me: Let’s try to do a sort of simple monster-hunting game based on this board game for 30 minutes of after school play.
Japanese Teacher: Okay, let’s try to make unique cards.
Me: Okay, 4 locations decks of 10 cards each?
JTE: 1, 2, 3,…40 cards. sure.
Me: By November, right?
JTE: sheepishly Maybe October….?
Me: Uhhh…..I’ll try?
We’re using the board from Flying Frog’s “Touch of Evil” as a focus thing, but not actually using dice just having kids say “I go here.”
Goal is to get kids to talk and answer questions or tell parts of a story.
The cards and such are to facilitate that.
Thinking a mechanic based on number of sentences the student says resulting better situations for them.
Junior high school kids, native Japanese.
Anybody else have ideas?
Update on this: …what I’m thinking right now is something simple like the game Clue.
The mechanic of Clue is that at the beginning of the game the circumstances of the murder are decided by setting aside three cards nobody sees in secret which reveal the murderer, the weapon, and the location. The remaining cards are dealt out to the players who keep them secret and the players go around saying “I think it was Colonel Mustard with the Gun in the Game Room” or whatever other combination of three cards they can. If a person has one of those cards, they disprove the theory by showing it to the person who just declared who then crosses that card off as a possibility, none of the other players get new info.
However, for us, we want the players to work together so this is what I think:
The monster is determined by setting aside four cards:
Weakness, Power, Lair, and Kind
And then the rest of the cards in the decks.
The players take their turn and name one card that they think the monster is.
“I think the monster is a Ghost”
Then they keep drawing through the deck and stop if they find the card they guessed because that means their guess was wrong.
“Oh no, it’s not a Ghost!”
They take that card out of the deck and set aside…all the cards of that category are reshuffled and a new monster card is drawn so all the other cards they saw don’t give hints but it can’t be a ghost a gain.
If they don’t find their guess then that deck is removed because now we know the monster is a Ghost and the next player can say:
“I think it’s power is Flight.” (or flying or whatever) and you check the power deck to see if Flight is in it.
And so on, until every deck is removed and each player then says how they fight the monster at the end.
10 of each deck:
Kinds – Ghost, Monster, Alien, Demon, Dragon, Werewolf, Beast, Goblin, Robot, Vampire
Weakness – Salt, Sunlight, Wood, Silver, Guns, Fire, Lightning, Magic, Music, Swords
Power – Strength, Speed, Magic, Technology, Mind Control, Flight, Horde, Invisible, Claws, Healing
Lair – Manor, Windmill, Keep, Forest, Fields, Marsh, Bridge, Crossroads, Town Hall, Church
Update on this: …what I’m thinking right now is something simple like the game Clue.
The mechanic of Clue is that at the beginning of the game the circumstances of the murder are decided by setting aside three cards nobody sees in secret which reveal the murderer, the weapon, and the location. The remaining cards are dealt out to the players who keep them secret and the players go around saying “I think it was Colonel Mustard with the Gun in the Game Room” or whatever other combination of three cards they can. If a person has one of those cards, they disprove the theory by showing it to the person who just declared who then crosses that card off as a possibility, none of the other players get new info.
However, for us, we want the players to work together so this is what I think:
The monster is determined by setting aside four cards:
Weakness, Power, Lair, and Kind
And then the rest of the cards in the decks.
The players take their turn and name one card that they think the monster is.
“I think the monster is a Ghost”
Then they keep drawing through the deck and stop if they find the card they guessed because that means their guess was wrong.
“Oh no, it’s not a Ghost!”
They take that card out of the deck and set aside…all the cards of that category are reshuffled and a new monster card is drawn so all the other cards they saw don’t give hints but it can’t be a ghost a gain.
If they don’t find their guess then that deck is removed because now we know the monster is a Ghost and the next player can say:
“I think it’s power is Flight.” (or flying or whatever) and you check the power deck to see if Flight is in it.
And so on, until every deck is removed and each player then says how they fight the monster at the end.
10 of each deck:
Kinds – Ghost, Monster, Alien, Demon, Dragon, Werewolf, Beast, Goblin, Robot, Vampire
Weakness – Salt, Sunlight, Wood, Silver, Guns, Fire, Lightning, Magic, Music, Swords
Power – Strength, Speed, Magic, Technology, Mind Control, Flight, Horde, Invisible, Claws, Healing
Lair – Manor, Windmill, Keep, Forest, Fields, Marsh, Bridge, Crossroads, Town Hall, Church